Mars B. Howard

Full Stack Software Engineer · Saint Louis, MO

marsbhoward@icloud.com(314) 313-6452

Experience

Founder & Lead Engineer · Donada

Apr 2026 — Present
  • Sole engineer on the Donada platform, live on Cardano mainnet: rental app, mint, Next.js site, Discord bots, and game backend, shipped through GitHub Actions CI/CD and Railway.
  • Wrote an Aiken (Plutus V3) minting policy that enforces price, mint window, and supply on-chain, with a React, TypeScript, and Lucid Evolution frontend for wallet connection and transaction building.
  • Automated prize draws on GitHub Actions, picking winners from the hash of the first block after the draw time, so any participant can verify the result.
  • Built Equivalence, a browser roguelike in Unity 6 (C#) using AI-assisted development in Claude Code, plus a CIP-30 wallet connector and a Node.js service that mints in-game gear on Cardano testnet. Play the showcase
  • Launched Discord bots that verify wallet ownership and sync token-gated roles from on-chain holdings.

Software Engineer · Mastercard

Dec 2022 — Apr 2026
  • Pinpointed a parsing defect before go-live that was limiting throughput and worked with developers on the fix, cutting API response time from 60ms to 25ms and raising projected capacity to 10,000 TPS.
  • Designed the Splunk and Dynatrace monitoring suite: a leadership KPI dashboard, a golden-signals SLA dashboard, an error-trend dashboard, and 20 alerts tuned to avoid false alarms.
  • Introduced chaos testing with a Chaos Monkey scaffold for the Spring Boot service.
  • Created Java test automation with Rest Assured for a Spring Boot service, reducing manual testing.
  • Tested changes for business case, functionality, and efficiency, and triaged production incidents.
  • Reviewed and approved production Java, joined all Scrum calls, and supported CI/CD quality gates.

Network Operations Analyst · Mastercard

Nov 2021 — Dec 2022
  • Provided technical analysis and support for 18 customer-impacting applications.
  • Retrieved data with SQL and accessed remote servers over SSH using Unix commands.
  • Created automation processes utilizing Python and Selenium.

Vehicle Service Technician · Enterprise Holdings

Oct 2015 — Nov 2021
  • Analyzed an average of one hundred vehicles per week for damage, inoperative equipment, and safety hazards.
  • Communicated with partnering shops to move vehicles in and out of the database, raising customer service score to 90/100.

Education

Full Stack Developer Program · Flatiron School

Jan — Jun 2020

CS50x · LaunchCode

2016

Computer Information Systems · Lincoln University

2009 — 2014

Skills

JavaTypeScriptJavaScriptPythonRubyReactNext.jsTailwind CSSReduxSpring BootNode.jsExpressRuby on RailsCardanoAikenLucid EvolutionMarloweBlockfrostIPFSUnityC#Rest AssuredSeleniumChaos MonkeyPostmanInsomniaGitHub ActionsRailwayHerokuSentrySplunkDynatracePostgreSQLSQLiteGitLinux/UnixSSHClaude Code